Work in progress - award plaques

One project we are working on now is an award plaque for a new fund that supports transdisciplinary experiments in the arts and sciences at a university (it hasn't been announced yet so I won't name the award / university). We were asked to make "some kinda of plaque that has space for like 100 names? Made of like walnut or oak?." If you aren't familiar with perpetual awards plaques they look like this:

Usually one new name gets added every year. We decided to explore switching up the rectangular grid with a more organic looking cellular one. It was also requested that we make it fancy, so we are adding ornate inlays.

The design we've landed on builds off our Corollaria design software (some background in our blog here). Black anodized aluminum name plates are each situated in a cell defined by an intricate maple inlay. Since we aren't working with off shelf wood plaques, we have the the freedom to make them non-rectangular. But once we did that it felt like having just one would look odd. So we split the plaque into three snuggly blobs.

Materials / Fabrication

This design consists of three materials which we need to source and fabricate: walnut for the plaques, maple veneer for the inlay, and aluminum for the name plates. We can make all the wood components in-house but we need to outsource the aluminum parts as we don't have a way to (reliably) cut metal.

We visited Ghent Wood Products, a local lumber mill, to source the walnut. We ended up buying a MASSIVE slab of walnut. We considered buying smaller pieces and joining them together or buying pre-made walnut butcher block but the price was going to be similar for a worse result. The slab we bought is 12 feet long, 1.5" thick and 23" wide at the widest point. The entire piece is not suitable for plaques due to a split on one end and some large knots. We'll have to find some other use for the rest of the wood.

For the maple veneer, we ordered some paper-backed veneer from VeneerSupplies dot com. We haven't ordered the aluminum plaques yet but it's looking like we might have them made by Xometry. They would be lasercut with a fiber laser from .04" thick 5052 aluminum. After cutting, they will be beadblasted, anodized black and put in tagged baggies. Each one is a unique shape so we need to keep track of which is which!

While we were sourcing materials, we also refined the design, adding a large name plate on top for the title of the fund, tweaking the plaque shapes, and figuring out how to pack more name plates in. We ended up with about 25 plates per plaque.

Prototyping

We ran through the fabrication process on a smaller piece of the walnut as a test. We used our Shopbot desktop CNC to plane the walnut (make the surface flat), cut out the plaque shape, and then round over the edge. We used our lasercutter to cut the maple veneer and raster a pocket in the walnut for the inlay. And finally glued the maple veneer into the walnut and clamped the whole thing. The process worked well but it's good we did a test because we do have some marks from planing that didn't sand out and we slightly oversanded the veneer resulting in a dark spot on the inlay. We'll do another test before the make the final plaques. We still need to test drilling the holes for the name plates (also on the CNC...not sure if we have a small enough router bit).

Software

Like most of our projects, our custom software is doing the heavy lifting but it's aided by some back and forth in Rhino. We figured out the overall shapes and sizes of the plaques in Rhino and then bring them into our C++ software to grow the cellular patterns. After that, it's back to Rhino where we used grasshopped to offset some of the cells for the name plates and number everything for fabrication. Visualization renderings were done in Blender using the built-in cycles render engine.